Lead Database Administrator
The Lead DBA owns the architecture, operations and strategic direction of the database platforms. The role spans infrastructure, application and reliability engineering disciplines ensuring environments are secure, scalable and performant. The Lead DBA works closely with the Engineering Manager, architects and engineering teams to define standards, guide technical decisions and mentor the DBA team. This role is both strategic and hands-on delivering business-critical database services.
- Lead the design and maintenance of highly available, fault-tolerant database infrastructure.
- Plan for growth and scalability aligned with business and platform needs.
- Evaluate and integrate emerging database technologies to improve performance and efficiency.
- Ensure compliance with security, governance and regulatory requirements.
- Manage resource utilisation across storage, compute, memory and networking.
- Implement and validate replication, clustering and disaster recovery strategies.
- Apply patches, upgrades and security hardening.
- Monitor database health, capacity and performance proactively.
- Collaborate with developers to optimise schema design, indexing and queries.
- Support deployments, migrations and application-aligned changes.
- Maintain data integrity and resilience across all workloads.
- Troubleshoot complex database and application-facing issues.
- Build and maintain CI/CD and automation pipelines.
- Automate routine operations including backups, restores and patching.
- Identify and remediate platform risks and points of failure.
- Partner with DevOps, SRE and platform teams on operational maturity.
- Define and enforce operational standards and best practices.
- Mentor Senior and Junior DBAs.
- Drive continuous improvement across database operations and tooling
- Strong experience across relational and non-relational platforms (MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) (required)
- Deep expertise in HA, replication, clustering and DR (required)
- Strong Linux administration and advanced scripting skills (required)
- Proven ability to solve complex performance issues (required)
- Strong understanding of security, compliance and governance (required)
- Experience leading teams and defining standards (required)
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD, automation and IaC (Ansible, Terraform) (required)
- Experience with cloud or hybrid database platforms (preferred)
- Familiarity with modern observability tooling (preferred)
- Knowledge of sharding, partitioning and scale-out strategies (preferred)
- Experience supporting application performance and database integration (preferred)
- A competitive rate of pay and pension contribution ( £80,000 - £90,000)
- Generous discretionary bonus schemes, incentives and competitions
- An annual leave entitlement that increases with length of service
- Access to an online GP 24/7, 365 days a year for you and your immediate family.
- Employee wellbeing support through our Employee Assistance Programme
- Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay
- Long Service Recognition
- Access to a pay day savings scheme, financial coach and up to 40% of your earned wage ahead of payday, through Wagestream.
Betfred is a leading betting and gaming company that has been at the forefront of the industry for over 50 years. With over 1300 shops and 9500 employees, we are constantly pushing ourselves to innovate and improve, and we are always on the lookout for the best talent to join our team. In 2019, we entered the US sports betting market as Betfred Sportsbook, and we now operate in 10 states. We have also recently established a new presence in South Africa, with over 50 betting halls, and we own a majority stake in Lottostar, South Africa's largest online betting company. At Betfred, our mission is to provide our customers with the best possible service, products and experience while ensuring responsible gambling. We believe our employees are our greatest asset and we are committed to providing them with the training and development they need to succeed. We offer a range of career opportunities, from retail positions in our shops to roles in our head office. We are also dedicated to giving back to the communities in which we operate. Through our Betfred Supports initiative, we support a range of charities and community initiatives.